gshaw

I hope for the users that the Citrix setup is more reliable than it was when I worked there many moons ago

The XP Royale Noir black theme ripped from Windows XP Media Center Edition was much better though

I remember thinking at the time I wouldn't be able to learn XP as my home PC was too old (1997 vintage in 2001) but then got hold of some scrap PC parts for the bare minimum spec... AMD K6 233, 64MB of SIMM (!) RAM, 2GB HDD and case sides made of sheet metal because the originals were missing. That machine ran pretty damn well for a good year or two until (lack of) disk space caught up with it

I'm guessing the creation of those accounts is still manual though or does it auto-create them on demand? What controls do you get with GPOs, is it a case of "block access to Store" or something more granular? Just getting a dev network with 2012 R2 up at the moment but haven't had chance to join any Win8.1 devices to it yet...

Pollo 13 - the story of an unfortunate chicken

What would be really powerful would be to have the Store as an Azure service so basically it'd be another 365 app e.g. https://store.yourdomain.ac.uk - at which point the organisation would have full control of what appears, for example a choice of... - approved apps only - pre-purchased apps via site license, click and download as required + free apps - full access to everything purchases need to be approved by organisation's Store admin before money is taken or set pre-paid limit e.g. £20 per user. I know MS are pushing InTune MDM as a way to manage some of this but would be nice to allow users to access the Store experience and breadth of choice whilst still giving admins a way to push out key apps and avoid runaway purchasing.

Another one of those little problems I wonder if there's a better way around but can't see one at present... We've ordered in a couple of Dell Venue Pro 11 tablets for staff use, not joined to a domain at present. We want the staff to be able to install Windows Store apps as they need, said staff are also on Office 365 for email etc. As it stands the only method I can see for each person is: - set up a Microsoft (i.e. personal) account with their work email address - set up either local or linked Microsoft account on the device If I don't either set up the Microsoft account or give instructions how to do so the staff won't be able to use the Windows Store. Not sure if this changes once machines are domained, can anyone confirm? One day I hope MS will sort out this authentication mess they have with the two separate systems and enable Office 365 accounts to be used with the Store, wouldn't that just make so much more sense?!

I've put 8.1 on most devices I use and don't mind the Start screen \ search on 8.1 (8.0 was horrible though) but have to agree many of the "Modern" apps are pretty poor. The only one I use is OneNote which works better than the desktop version, apart from that every other app is better in its legacy form. Live tiles are useful for email and similar and for a couple of frequently-used programs so I can tolerate that, works well on the touch-screen devices it was intended for and not unbearable even on a 23" widescreen. What I don't like is how inconsistent the navigation is using the Charms and similar. For example in apps you'd expect to be able to use the search charm to find information inside that app but in the Windows Store that doesn't work and you have to find the other search bar at the top which to me feels rather counter-intuitive. It's still too easy to get "out of control" by accidentally activating the hot corners when you don't want them, not sure how MS can get around that though. Alongside other stupidities like needing both Office 365 and Microsoft accounts to use certain features in 8.1 \ Office 2013 it just seems like MS need to sit down and sort out all the oddities and smooth the user experience before trying anything more radical as at times it's all over the place.

I think it also depends on your internal DNS domain name as well, ours is what Microsoft call split horizon and 365 doesn't like it very much

Another vote for Dell Venue Pro 11, just ordered 4 of them for a CRM project, closest thing you can get to a Surface with full Windows 8. Also on offer at Dell at the moment, £400 for the Atom version (which in quad core guise is pretty quick!)

We had exactly this problem, looks like you've found most of the solutions already as ours needed: 1) IPv6 disabled 2) bypass authentication for Office 365 domains (similar to the iTunes above) 3) staff added to software download category (as some of the 365 stuff comes down via the Akamai CDN) There's also a bug in Outlook 2013 (may or may not be fixed in SP1) where AutoDiscover will fail when setting up a profile. That's due to Outlook still trying to go out directly despite the PC having a proxy configured in Internet Options. The only workaround is to use Auto Detect with a WPAD \ PAC file and explicitly state the Office 365 domains to use the proxy server. Enjoy!

Think I need a quick sanity check on this as I'm begining to wonder if I'm going mad Situation is as follows: user has an Exchange mailbox (on Office 365) user wants to share their Inbox with another user user may want to share either a) their entire Inboxincluding subfolders or b) certain folders within the Inbox So after going through the obvious UI options and previous experience I have three methods of achieving the above Use the manual Folder Permissions button and set permissions on each folder that needs to be shared, quite laborious for multiple subfolders as permissions don't flow down the folder tree Use the Delegate Access option that lets the user set Inbox and Calendar from the same place, also generates a nice email but only applies to the Inbox folder (no subfolders again). New subfolders will be shared but existing ones won't (!) Apply the Full Access permission via Powershell to give access to all mailbox items, however this isn't user self-serviceable How are others managing this (if at all?)

The only time I've had to use VMWare over Virtualbox was to test some PXE boot functionality and certain virtual appliances that wouldn't run properly in Virtualbox. In that scenario I just used the freebie VM Player and lived without snapshot functionality.

The way I did mine on Windows 7 was to make my base image as a virtual machine then snapshot it just before running sysprep. Then after the image was captured to SCCM I reverted the snapshot to work on the profile. That way you'll be working on a machine that matches the base state of how all your other workstations will be. Personally I'd say do it without AV as the scanning increases the likelihood of problems. Once done replace the original sysprep file with the basic "copyprofile" one and run sysprep to generate the supported profile. At this point I deviate from the Microsoft guide as they say click the Copy To button and provide a UNC path. With my machine being on virtual (and thus not part of a domain) I found it easier to do the copy to a local folder on the VM then extract it manually (e.g. via the C$ admin share). Finally copy it to a suitable place on the network and test, worked perfectly for me with Windows 7 and about 220 machines. Boot time from powered off state to working desktop was 1 minute 30 seconds

Very cheap price but having used the 8" tablets at BETT not sure if Desktop mode is worthwhile on such a small screen and even Metro still looks a bit cramped. Definitely kills off RT if there was ever any doubt, no point having the less functional OS now with the new range of devices coming out that can do performance with decent battery life. Prefer the Nexus 7 in the 7-8" screen size range but have been very impressed with the performance of the quad core Bay Trail in the Dell Venue 11 Pro I have in on trial at the moment. If the offers come in on the 11" devices to get them to £300 then we're really in a good position, I'm the Venue 11 Pro 64GB for £400 inc. VAT but they stuff you on the keyboard cover which at not far off £100 is ridiculous!

Not to mention the ever increasing CPU and memory requirements on the hardware side

Seems like ChromeOS is morphing into Windows in slow motion

Ultimately the sensible solution would be for any account holders under 18 to only be able to use pre-paid cards, maybe 16 if you go for the youth debit card schemes. Publishers won't do it as they're actively preying on young \ naive gamers to increase their profit margins and they're raking in the £££ right now.

Spot on @j17sparky it's a rip-off, sadly the next generation of gamers (younger teens \ early 20's) raised on the Apple business model seem to think it's perfectly reasonable and that they should pay for all this extra stuff - I've actually seen someone say this on the EA forums, quite sad really how much control the publishers are wielding these days.

This is why I've ignored the next-gen consoles so far and leaning towards giving up on them completely - the games market is getting as bad (if not worse) than the music & films industry for ripping people off. Everything on these new consoles seems to be geared towards how much customers can get fleeced for, now you don't just buy the game but get stiffed for expansion packs and power-ups that leave those who refuse to buy them with a poorer experience. BF4 and "Premium" also really grates on me, comes to not shy of £100 to get maps and ability to connect to servers in a reasonable way, never mind the fact the game wasn't fit for purpose for nearly 6 months after release As someone on the EA forums was saying the other day Ultimate Team is basically under-age gambling, how they're allowed to get away with it sums up what a greedy and morally questionable bunch EA are. It does make me chuckle though when my bunch of freebies outplays one chock full of blue \ black player power-up cards

Are you sure about the behaviour of ADFS with Outlook desktop client (not OWA)? Every document I've seen suggests the Outlook client will always ask for credentials even with ADFS present... A fairly recent example - Microsoft Office 365 Community

Wordpress as a VLE? That's an interesting move...

Replace MSE with something else, detection rates fallen through the floor over the last year or so as MS seem to have lost interest in it. I've gone back to AVG, seems like they've sorted themselves out after some horrible releases a couple of years back.

It's funny, many of the comments on another site that featured Chromeboxes was how good they'd with Windows or XBMC installed... no-one was excited for ChromeOS Still wonder when / how Google are planning on merging ChromeOS with Android as the amount of overlap is crazy between the two products.

I wouldn't say it's a horrible interface but it could be a lot better in places. The front screen particularly seems a wasted opportunity as I don't always want to go into Outlook (SkyDrive \ Sharepoint) yet I have to use a rather small strip at the top of the screen to navigate, not great on touch devices. The welcome screen that comes up the first couple of times you log in would make a nice tile-esque interface imo. It could show me my most recent emails, upcoming calendar appointments, recently opened documents and followed Sharepoint sites that I can hit as easily as Windows 8 tiles. Also provide an option that lets the user change the behaviour to either use the welcome screen or auto bounce off to either Outlook, SkyDrive or SharePoint and it becomes so much more user friendly